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##Working Class History: What it is, What it isn't, and Why it matters

History Upside Down is first and foremost about creating a space on AskHistorians for our contributors to share stories about the past featuring individuals and groups who don't, for all manner of reasons, get the attention they deserve - whether that's within academic history, in the pages of books that fill highstreet bookstores, or on the subreddit itself. We are running the series to give an opportunity for our existing contributors to share knowledge and insights on topics they don't very often get to discuss, and to encourage those who have knowledge but face barriers to sharing it - whether that's a lack of opportunity to answer questions or a worry that they aren't good enough - to do so with our community. To open the series though, and to illustrate why the approach we've taken is so important, I want to do something a little bit different. You'll get some actual history from me in later threads when we venture near my areas of expertise. Instead, this essay is going to be a very personal exploration of what working class history is and why it matters from my perspective, as a working class man who never in a million would have believed he'd one day be volunteering alongside professional historians and accomplished scholars on the team that runs the world's largest forum for the discussion of academic history.

###What do we mean by 'working class'?

'Class' is an extremely complicated thing. There is no singular definition of what historians and sociologists mean by the word class that doesn't come with the need for some kind of caveat or further explanation. The understanding of class individual scholars have is invariably informed by their own life, their private moral and political philosophy, the nature of the work they're doing, and their own nation or region's historic relationship with the idea of class. For some people class is a straight forward thing; for others it is very complicated and multi-layered. The challenge of agreeing on a concrete definition of class is perhaps best evident in considering the question of whether or not an individual can truly move between classes in society, and if they can, how difficult that process is. Much as historians try, there isn't - or at least I don't think there is - any way to perfectly set aside our own political and moral views when trying to decide what we mean by class. It's an inherently political question rich with implications for public policy and moral philosophy in the here and the now, not just the past.

Still, there are working definitions that we can use even if they don't fit every need or every understanding perfectly. Class as most scholars use the term is probably best defined as a large group of people occupying a place in the hierarchy of a society, defined first by economic status; second by a shared set, or category, of social norms and experiences; and third by the relationship with other classes in the hierarchy. Crucially - and this really is essential to understand - class isn't just about how much money or the way you live your life now. Class is shaped very heavily, in most people's cases decisively, by the formative experiences you have before your adulthood. Whilst your economic circumstances can change through time, it's these formative years that tend to exert the greatest influence on the social norms and values you develop and the relationship you have, good or bad, with people and things associated with other classes. This makes class a much more complicated thing than simple wealth or income. Many readers will have heard the term nouveau riche or new money somewhere before; a usually derogatory term used to refer to people who have acquired considerable wealth but, not having been born with and raised in it, are not seen by those who inherited wealth to share the values, traditions or subtle social conventions of the upper classes.

Things get even more complicated when we talk about how we define each individual class within a hierarchy. The idea of an 'upper class' is pretty straight-forward; whilst there's disagreement over the boundary, we all know that there are some individuals in the world who come from families who come from very old money and live lives quite alien to the vast majority of us, and that there are other individuals who are wealthy almost beyond comprehension. Pretty much every system of understanding class has some kind of 'upper class' in it. It's the other classes in a hierarchy that are hardest to define. Some people advocate for a straight-forward binary model: the upper class consists of those who primarily benefit from the labour of others, usually representing a single-digit percentage of the population, and the rest of the world is a super-class of people who primarily depend on their own labour. This isn't quite what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels meant by class - the Marxist class framework is a bit more complicated than that even in its original form - but it's essentially the same idea. At the other end of the spectrum, you will find something like Mosaic. Mosaic is a British system developed by the credit referencing agency Experian for market research and political campaigning purposes. It has 8 social classes who also exist parallel in a set of 11 master categories, which in turn divide into a total of more than 60 distinct demographic groups in society, all partly classed based. Whilst a sociologist's dream for looking at the world today this is probably much more detail than could ever be useful to the historian given that norms and values and traditions across classes are likely to be in flux in the periods we're studying. That's to say nothing of the fact we almost certainly don't have the body of material evidence we'd need to construct such a granular segmentation model of most historical societies.

And therein lies another challenge: class, as a concept, is not universally and neatly applicable to the entirety of human history in the way we generally understand it in the 21st century. Our modern understanding of class is overwhelmingly rooted in the events, politics and social norms of the last couple of centuries of European and to a lesser extent North American history. Once we start reaching into the pre-industrial era the ideas we have about class today become harder and harder to extrapolate back. Human societies have always been stratified along socioeconomic lines, yes, but the form and fluidity of those hierarchies has changed radically through the centuries. It's probably not possible to talk about anything resembling our modern class structures in Ancient Rome or Ancient Greece for example. And many think that our understanding of class in popular culture and academic research alike lags behind the reality of the 21st century with all the added layers of complexity to our economy and social orders technological innovation and changes in the global pattern of industrialisation have brought. All of this makes writing class-based histories extremely challenging if we don't want to fall into the trap of anachronistically imposing our modern ideas about human relationships onto the past.

Now in Britain in the 21st century in any kind of quantitative research that has an interest in class hierarchy, you will usually find that the model for breaking down class is the National Readership Survey Social Grade system. This grading system was devised some time in the 1950s to help understand what kind of magazines were read by what kind of people in British society, so that private firms could make informed choices about what publications they were best placed advertising their products and services in. The social grade system is unusual in that it at no point factors in someone's income into determining their class. Instead, it looks at the highest earning adult in a household and makes a judgement about them based on the kind of work they do (or did if they are retired), whether they have any managerial responsibilities at work, what educational qualifications they have and what qualifications a job like theirs would ordinarily require. From this entire households are sorted into one of six social grades:

The UK Government has a very similar 8-tier classification for class calculated slightly differently as well as a whole host of other proxy measurements of class depending on the purpose, but the NRS grade is the one most people are familiar with. Despite not asking about income it does closely match the income distribution of the UK; though there are exceptions, the higher your NRS grade, the higher your income. Most publications simplify the NRS structure into four smaller groups: AB (the top 27%), C1 (the next 23%), C2 (the next 20%, and DE (the bottom 25%). These groups are commonly summarised as 'Upper Middle Class', 'Lower Middle Class', 'Skilled Working Class' and 'Semi/Unskilled Working Class' respectively, which leads to further simplification where ABC1 are sometimes described as 'Middle Class' and C2DE 'Working Class'. The NRS' emphasis on education and job type is an attempt to capture the fact that class aligns to but does not stem from income and purchasing power alone - the NRS was created to try and help advertisers tailor their products to the social norms, values, aspirations and self-perception seen as typical to each class, not necessarily the wallets of individual consumer groups.

One of my personal bugbears when it comes to the way we write and think about history is the commonly-used trope of ‘forgotten’ history. The example that tipped me over the edge a few years ago was something I happened to read on Holocaust Memorial Day about the ‘forgotten victims’ of Nazism, a category expansive enough to include millions of priests, communists and socialists, Roma and Sinti, and LGBT people murdered by the regime. What irked me then, and has continued to do whenever I encounter the trope ever since, was the inherent contradiction between claiming that something has been forgotten whilst simultaneously publicly discussing it.

The many victims of Nazism, of course, have not been forgotten, not by professional historians, certainly not by the communities they came from and not even, I would guess, by a significant proportion of the general public. An uncharitable interpretation of this trend is historians making a lazy grab for originality and impact – they are nobly saving their subjects from the indignity of being forgotten, implying sole ownership of the topic, as well as asserting its inherent importance in halting an intellectual extinction. It might also be viewed as a matter of establishing progressive ‘street cred’, implicitly contrasting oneself with the Eurocentrics/Establishment/Other who are more conventional in their approaches and therefore aiding and abetting forgetting. Yet this model of history writing – which frames the historian (rarely, however, the archivist or subjects they got their information from) as the saviour of the past – is deeply problematic.

You might well be asking what on earth this has to do with working-class histories. Working class histories are often in considerable danger of being ‘discovered’ by academic or other historians eager to rescue the past from itself. I know this, because I came pretty close to doing it myself.

My own specialist research deals with international responses to the Spanish Civil War, a subject I’ve written about a great deal on this forum. More specifically, I specialise in the tens of thousands of private individuals who travelled to Spain to fight in the conflict, generally out of a genuine desire to oppose the spread of fascism. Even more specifically, I investigated a specific contingent of these volunteers: those that came from Scotland.

If you’ve heard of the foreign volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, odds are you have people like George Orwell, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden or some other young, male writer who went to Oxford or Cambridge. It was, in the popular imagination, quite the literary war, with ‘poets exploding like bombs’ in Auden’s words. Yet this disguises the reality that the vast majority of those that went to Spain came from working-class backgrounds. In the Scottish case, close to 98% of those whose social background is known came from solidly working-class backgrounds. Over 500 working-class Scots journeyed to Spain to fight in defense of the Spanish Republic. Nearly a quarter of them are still buried there.

Their’s is a remarkable story, yet one that has remained surprisingly marginal in academic history writing in Scotland. The history of working-class politics and activism in interwar Scotland is hardly neglected, yet most such accounts shy away from dealing with the impact of the war in Spain. Perhaps for this reason – and, I won’t lie, it was one of the reasons I decided to focus on this case study – there has never been any sustained academic interest in the Scottish volunteers in Spain. This is in marked contrast to literally any comparable contingents – the Irish got two academic books on them published in 1999 alone, while even comparatively tiny contingents like the Australians and Cypriots had dedicated studies published decades ago. Even in the many accounts that focus on British involvement in the conflict, Scotland has remained entirely marginal. At best, distinctive features – such as the disproportionate number of Scottish volunteers among the British contingent in Spain – have been noted, but never explained. Other aspects, such as the impact and basis of pro-Republican solidarity campaigns, have been addressed within British or English frameworks, but never with particular regard for Scottish sources and perspectives.

In light of this, it was tempting to claim that my work deals with ‘forgotten’ history – the uncovering of a neglected Scottish past that otherwise would remain obscure and unknown. Yet this could not be further from the truth. Scotland’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War has never been forgotten, even as surviving participants slowly dwindled, and historians at Scotland’s universities focused elsewhere. Local history has been preserved and remembered, with exhibitions, concerts and plays still regularly organised in the honour of Scotland’s contribution to the struggle. Since the 1970s, memorials to the conflict, and the Scots who died there, have been built across the country, from the banks of the Clyde to Princes Street Gardens, from plaques in Ayrshire villages to trade union offices in Aberdeen. Since the 1970s, memorials to the conflict, and the Scots who died there, have been built across the country, from the banks of the Clyde to Princes Street Gardens, from plaques in Ayrshire villages to trade union offices in Aberdeen. A number of books – including several local studies and one popular history of Scottish involvement in the conflict – have been written and published by those involved in these efforts. Working-class communities have been remembering, and celebrating, their own histories.

A reasonable observer might well ask: what then is the point of my work, or indeed academic history writing more broadly, if this story has already been remembered and preserved in a relatively complete form? Answering this question took time and reflection. A bad answer I considered and discarded was that as an outsider (in both class and national terms), I could be more distant and therefore objective. Quite aside from the premise, which implicitly discredits the work of anyone who doesn't fit the academic mould (ie white and middle-class), anyone who looks at the politics of the 1930s and thinks "Yes, these are issues regarding which I am neutral" can get in the sea. However, I do retain some faith in the methodology and scholarship that professional historians employ – I don’t claim knowledge that doesn’t for the most part exist elsewhere, but I do think that I’ve got the skills needed to make some additional sense out of that knowledge, and answer some questions that have remained unresolved. More broadly, I think that I can ensure that this particular history doesn’t exist in vacuum – it’s part of a much broader story of the Spanish Civil War itself, the nature of interwar communist movements as well as an important chapter in the wider ideological battle that defined the 1930s. But what I am definitely not doing is writing a ‘forgotten’ history.

I'm taking advantage of the relaxed moderating standards for this thread to speak a bit generally about economic history and the working class. And, also, I'm going to treat the term "working class" very loosely.

  I've noticed a bit of a tendency in some of the questions here that I've answered, or the follow-up questions, to think of the economy as something driven by the decisions of particular people: leading politicians, or large business owners, or inventors. So there's questions about why economic growth was so strong post WWII, what led to the return. Or, perhaps, there's questions about what contribution colonisation made to the British Industrial Revolution, and sometimes when I respond "probably negative" I get a bit of surprise about what else could have driven it.

  But, as I've learnt more about economic history (in part, through answering questions here), I've grown more to appreciate the contributions of everyone: of the great mass of people, who get up and go to their jobs (be they waged, or unpaid 'housework', or 'entrepreneurial', to use the National Accounting term), adapting each day to what life throws at them. We see this vividly now, with the coronavirus, as people work out ways to keep on helping each other. More historically, the British Industrial Revolution has been revised from a relatively short, dramatic event, driven by some key inventions (the spinning jenny, the steam engine, iron production) to a much longer event spreading over centuries, spread across multiple industries. Lots of bits and bits of improvements, all over the place. And the Industrial Revolution was preceded and accompanied by the English Agricultural Revolution: a similar centuries-long event, where mainly unrecorded farmers and craftsmen specialising in agricultural tools developed and shared new techniques: not just in England but across England, the Netherlands and northern France (including what is now Belgium). Or, similar subtle increases in agricultural output that were going on at the same time in Edo-era Japan in the other side of the world. (And presumably going on elsewhere, England and Japan are a bit unusual firstly in the level of quantitative data collected there for the time, and secondly in being rich enough for decades to fund academics digging around into this). People, making choices every day, about how to make their lives better, or at least to stave off disaster.

  Yes, choices. Choices under constraint, but choices. The 'working class', be that the stereotypical Yorkshireman with a peaked cap marching off to the factory every day (one of my family lines is that), and his wife bargaining for vegetables at the markets, or broader, from farmers to office workers to Japanese merchants.

  To quote the economic historian Deidre McCloskey, on the neoclassical economists' approach to history:

Neoclassicals are obsessed with Choice, and see choice where others see subordination or necessity. They would urge the historian not to jump too hastily to a diagnosis that peasants follow their plows by custom alone or that traders trust each other on grounds of solidarity alone.

That is the main payoff to thinking neoclassically about history. The historian will be able to see choices where she did not before. The businessperson must choose between markets at home and abroad; the consumer must choose between buying in the village or in the town: the male laborer must choose between a factory or an apprenticeship; the female homeworker must choose between making homespun or entering the market.

  ...

To emphasize a free choice is of course to take seriously a certain political agenda. ... The alternatives to mainstream, bourgeois economics - above all Marxist economics, but also institutionalist and other smaller schools - spend a good deal of their time attacking the reality of free choice. They argue that the free choice that matters is choosing the institution within which the so-called freedom is exercised, not choosing from inside a given institution. Freedom in such a view consists not in being free to sleep under the bridges, but in being free to change the society that allows people to be homeless.  [Emphasis in original]

To this the bourgeois economist ... can reply as follows: Yes the wider choices of reform and revolution are important. ... But the Marxists and institutionalists, says the neoclassical, underestimate how powerful are the small choices. The individual choices by rice buyers and factory owners in the economy are like the movements of air molecules in a balloon. The economics of choice examines the single molecules, with an eye on their behaviour in the mass. It is a Tolstoyan point, that even Napoleon's history needs to be told from the point of view of the common solider on the battlefield, who in a mass sets the conditions under which the Great Man maximises, or fails to maximise.

  This is not to say that choices everyone makes are always rational, or good choices. But, though it is common amongst academics these days to criticise the economists' assumption of rationality, our ancestors, whatever else they did, managed to raise the next generation to adulthood, in a life mainly full of dangers, from crop failures to farm animals, to cooking over open fires, to roughly-made machinery. It is hard to envisage how they could have done that if they were irrational. Perhaps we are more irrational now than past generations, because we have the luxury to be so. My great-grandma, when she did the laundry, started by lighting a fire to heat the water. She didn't have my luxury of a washing machine, or a laundromat down the road when that breaks. She couldn't afford to waste time, or resources, like I can. (And also, I often find myself, when reading a critique of rationality, wondering how rational the authors think themselves to be. Do they query their own rationality, do they doubt their observations?)

  So raise a glass to the 'working class': to all of us who may never make the history books, who are never perfectly rational, but who each day get up and do the best we can, for ourselves and for our loved ones, and, surprisingly often to a cynical economist, for perfect strangers. May future generations recognise the importance of our choices. And, to draw on one part of my heritage, kia kaha whanau (Maori/Te Reo for "be strong, family").

    Source

  Deidre McCloskey: The Economics of Choice: Neoclassical Supply and Demand, in Thomas Rawski, ed., Economics and the Historian (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995): 122-158.  https://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/pdf/Article_106.pdf  

So, my contribution is going to be a lot less meta than most of the other ones - I'd just like to share an aspect of working-class history which I have researched! My research is about the musical lives of women who worked as itinerant herring gutters in the Scottish fishing industry from the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries. Full disclosure: I'm a middle-class American, so this is not writing about my own community, though my great-grandfather was a Norwegian fisherman, and his mother may have been a herring gutter (women from her town travelled to Scotland to gut herring). I became interested in this topic when I moved to a Scottish fishing village and started volunteering at the Scottish Fisheries Museum. I have found though that older people in my community are bemused but happy that an outsider has taken an interest in their history, and my talks about the subject in fishing heritage communities have been well-received, so I take that as a good sign! :)

In the 19th century, the herring fishing became one of Scotland's most important industries. The fishing season lasted from roughly May to November, and it travelled around the coast of Britain to follow the migrating shoals of herring. It began in the Hebrides and the Irish Sea, then wound around to the Northern Isles, down the east coast of Scotland, and finally ending in East Anglia in the winter. While the men worked as fishermen, women who worked as herring gutters followed the fleets so that they'd be ready in the ports when the fish landed. The women would work gruelling hours in tough conditions, gutting and packing the fish in salted barrels for export around the world. Women were usually around 14 when they started this work, and some continued doing it even after they married and had children. Most of the women were Scottish, but there were also English, Irish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Manx women participating in the industry. Women continued working as herring gutters until the disappearance of the herring from British shores in the mid-20th century (a change mainly attributed to overfishing and climate change).

When I was volunteering in the Scottish Fisheries Museum, I came across a reference that said the women would often sing while they gut the fish. This really intrigued me and I asked the curator if we could put up something about music in the museum, but she said I'd have to research it first since there wasn't much information about that available! So that's how I got started researching this rather obscure topic of women's work song in the Scottish fishing industry. I did an independent research project about the subject in my undergrad, and then I did my masters thesis on Gaelic work song in the fishing industry, so I'll share now a bit of what I've found through this research. The main sources are oral history archives, which Scotland has an impressive collection of - most notably in the School of Scottish Studies Archives at the University of Edinburgh, which has ethnographic recordings going back to 1949. There are also significant collections of this material at the Elphinstone Institute in Aberdeen and Canna House.

It turns out that women sang a rich variety of songs while gutting the herring. Frances Wilkins, a researcher at the University of Aberdeen, has written about how in the Northeast of Scotland, the content of gutters' songs was heavily influenced by evangelical revivals that hit the fishing communities in Peterhead and Fraserburgh. After a particularly bad fishing season, evangelical fervour swept through the fishing communities (dates are not my strong point, but one of these was around the turn of the 20th century and the other was in 1921). People began singing hymns at all different occasions, so fishermen and fish gutters would also sing while they worked. They tended to favour hymns with nautical themes, such as "Throw Out the Lifeline", and they were strongly influenced by the American Moody and Sankey hymnbook Sacred Songs and Solos.

However, not all gutters sang such pious songs. In my masters research looking at archival recordings of gutting songs in the Scottish Gaelic language, I found that the majority of them were love songs. A song would have a general outline, but individual women would improvise verses which often served to tease their fellow gutters about the fishermen they were romantically interested in. The fishing season often ended in weddings between gutters and fishermen, since it was one of the main ways you could meet someone from outside your own village. Some of the songs were quite ribald, and their cheerful tone reflects the assertion by many gutters that it was the happiest time of their life. Although the work was very hard, it was a time to travel the world, meet new people, and, for teenagers, spend a fair amount of time unsupervised by adults.

The gutters would gather in their temporary housing for impromptu dances on Saturday evenings. Some of this dancing would be accompanied by puirt-à-beul, "mouth music", a genre of Gaelic song which involves singing very fast tongue-twisters to accompany dancing. Gaelic-speaking women had a long tradition of singing to accompany both dance and work - the most famous Gaelic work songs are the slow waulking songs women sang at the beginning of the process of waulking the tweed. But dance songs were generally better suited to the quick pace of gutting fish - women could gut up to 60 fish a minute!

You can hear an example of a gutting song here sung by Mary Morrison, a gutter from Barra who contributed more gutting songs to the School of Scottish Studies than any other contributor. This one is about her boyfriend, who is kept away from her because he's having engine trouble on the boat where he works. Although this recording was not done in an actual gutting yard, the way that the other women join in on the vocable ("nonsense" syllables which encode information about rhythm) chorus reflects how the song would have been sung at the gutting: one woman sings the verses and the others join in on the refrain. This is also how waulking songs were sung in Gaelic-speaking communities.

Unusually for Gaelic song, gutting songs include a lot of English loan-words, usually to do with the fishing industry. You can hear English words and phrases like "engine trouble", "gangway", "deck-hand", "private", and "shottie" (a Scots word referring to a catch of fish) in the song linked above. Although Gaelic speakers had basic English education in school, most Gaelic-speaking herring gutters learned English with a steep learning curve while at the herring. Gaelic-speakers have often been stereotyped as conservative and resistant to the outside world, and the forces of the English language and industrialization have been blamed for the decline of the Gaelic song tradition. However, the story of the herring gutters complicates this monolithic narrative, which paints Gaels as victims helpless against the forces of the outside world encroaching upon their culture. These women sang cheerfully about "foreign" men they encountered from England and mainland Scotland, they mixed English and Scots words in with their Gaelic, and they sang about how much they wanted economic changes. For example, they often sang about the houses they wanted their boyfriends to build them - not traditional thatched blackhouses like they had back home, but whitewashed houses with stairs and wooden floors like they saw in their travels to places like Shetland.

There is less evidence about what Scots-speaking gutters sang when they weren't singing hymns. However, a neighbour of mine came to a talk I gave about the fishing music several years ago. After my talk, he turned to the woman next to him and sang a little song he said he hadn't thought of in 60 years, but his mother had sung it to him when he was a child in the 1930s. I later recorded an interview with him, and he sang a little ditty his mother had improvised to the tune of "Bon Accord" when she was a herring gutter. It was in Scots, referenced local boat registration numbers, and was written to tease her friend about the fisherman she had a crush on - by the time she was singing this to her son, the two had married and were their neighbours. As far as I know, this is the only recording of a Scots gutting song that exists, but I am hoping to do a PhD to do research in more archives to see if there are others. A woman from Buckie interviewed by Buckie Heritage in the 1980s said that the women used to sing awful dirty songs before they "got religion", so it seems likely that Scots- and English-speaking women would also improvise teasing songs when gutting, just like their Gaelic-speaking counterparts, but this requires further research. (1/2)

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I'd like to preface this by saying that writing for this floating feature has been an immense challenge - I tend to mesh well with specific, narrow questions, and with pursuing specific goals in my writing: a paper, a prompt, a grade. Tackling something as open ended as 'working class histories' is a real challenge for me, but I appreciate the opportunity to try leaving my comfort zone a bit and launch into a winding, probably incoherent narrative about what I've studied the most, American labor history. So, thanks to the mod team for opening this up and even letting me know it was happening.

There's an unfortunate tendency in labor history writing to take a decidedly Marxian or Socialist stance at the outset, or through the writings themselves. In my case in particular, red flags (no pun intended) were quickly raised in my first ever labor history class when the Professor opened with a particularly in-depth analysis and argument in favor of the Labor Theory of Value, and a great deal of the class was taught with a decidedly socialist bent. In a lot of ways, it felt like a particularly European take on American class relations for most of the class's run time, and very little weight was given to uniquely American perspectives. I see this a lot online today - internet socialists, for all their flaws, have a real tendency to see things as a European, use exclusively Marxist terms, and the like. I know that Marxism is supposed to be a globalizing ideology, but I'll always make the case that American conceptions of class relations and class structure is unique, perhaps particularly unique to just this one country. We've always gotta be the exception, I suppose.

I tend to object to Marxist perspectives being superimposed over American history because so much of American labor history has been shaped by a decidedly non-Socialist ideology, that of small-r republicanism. Understanding republicanism, I'd argue, is central to understanding why America's class relations and social structure are so decidedly, well, American. Socialism never really took hold in America like it did in Europe thanks to the thoughts and writings of republican thinkers and leaders at all levels of wealth.

The crux of republicanism was the glorification of ‘free labor and free men.’ Work was seen as a moral good when performed for the benefit of yourself or your family, and an emphasis was placed on those who were the ‘masters of their own small worlds-’ smallholders, minor landowners, independent businessman-farmers, the like. Republicanism and Jeffersonianism are often compared interchangeably, but I’d argue this isn’t really exactly true, as the broader ideology of republicanism built upon and improved the fundamental tenets of Jeffersonianism. Republicans of the mid-1900s ‘glorified’ free labor, but their understanding of what exactly free labor is is itself a fascinating question. Free labor was most usually presented as a direct opponent of the unfree slave labor of the south; utilized by early republican thinkers to contrast what they viewed as the increasingly dynamic and bold north with the regressive, conservative (small c) South - in many ways, it was as much a political ideology as an economic one. Abraham Lincoln argued that "Labor is prior to, and independent of capital . . . in fact, capital is the fruit of labor” and republican orators stressed the preeminence of labor in every facet of Northern society. Yet the modern conception of ‘working class’ does not fit this 19th century conception of free labor, as republicanism was a decidedly middle class ideology. The laborer of the republican imagination was a freeholder, a land owner, a small independent farmer of the Jeffersonian ideal. Northern free labor was seen as being dignified, the small man striking out on his own and obtaining wealth, contrasted quite strongly with the undignified slaveowning elites of the South. Again striking a decidedly un-Marxist message, republicans believed the primary motivation of the worker was to obtain wealth and one day become a wealthy capital holder themselves, something which republicans believed could not be achieved in urban areas. Indeed, despite a sometimes overwhelming focus in labor history circles on the urban workingman, the factory worker, the urban union member, conceptions of the working class in America were shaped by a class of thinkers who believed an escape from the city was crucial to becoming a working man, a free laborer. Prominent republican thinkers weren’t huge fans of urban areas, and believed that the urban underclass should be incentivized to leave the city and strike out on their own in the country (reflected by laws like the Homestead act). To republicans, a wage worker was not dissimilar from a southern slave - working for another man with no hope for advancement. Class mobility was king - class identity was an afterthought to republicans, many of whom dominated early American political life. There’s this common take that American workers aren’t radical because everyone believes themselves to be a ‘temporarily disadvantaged millionaire,’ and to be frank that isn’t all true - because the earliest conceptions of American working life was shaped by people who emphasized self improvement and mobility, believed that true free labor was one were one could benefit themselves and their family without concern for a boss or a wage. Class identity in America was shaped by the fact that the dominant American political thinkers of our formative years believed the interests of poor and rich to be essentially aligned. "We are not of the number of those who would array one class of society in hostility to another," the Cincinnati Gazette announced during the social dislocations caused by the Panic of 1857. Greeley agreed that "Jacobin ravings in the Park or elsewhere, against the Rich, or the Banks," could in no way alleviate "the distress of the poor." This isn’t to say that republicans favored corporations or big business or the economic upper class - republican papers consistently compared the capital-dominating corporations of the time to large southern slaveowners, critiqued ‘money capitalists’ and often attacked the concept corporate structure itself, crucially because the concept of making money through holding money stood in direct opposition to the obtaining of wealth by hard work and dedication Republicanism was firmly middle class in perspective and outlook.

Welcome to the first installment of ‘History Upside Down’, our Spring 2020 Floating Feature and Flair Drive Series. This series it intended to shine a light on people often left out of the ‘standard’ histories, and give voice to the subalterns of history.

Today’s theme is Working Class Histories, and we welcome anyone and everyone to share histories that fir that theme, however they might interpret it. Stories of triumph or tragedy, or cheerful or sad, all are welcome.

Floating Features are intended to allow users to contribute their own original work. If you are interested in reading recommendations, please consult our booklist, or else limit them to follow-up questions to posted content. Similarly, please do not post top-level questions. This is not an AMA with panelists standing by to respond. Such questions ought to be submitted as normal questions in the subreddit.

As is the case with previous Floating Features, there is relaxed moderation here to allow more scope for speculation and general chat than there would be in a usual thread! But with that in mind, we of course expect that anyone who wishes to contribute will do so politely and in good faith.

Coming up next in the series is The Women's Histories Floating Feature, on March 31st. Make sure to mark it on your calendar!